The Hill – Predrag Lesic
“The American economy continues to produce jobs in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). According to a 2014 report by the General Accounting Office (GAO) the nation’s job growth between 2004 and 2012 was nearly expressly due to job creation in STEM fields. Non-STEM jobs remained about the same in number over that time span. While the percentage of students earning degrees in STEM fields has increased over the past decade, America still lags behind other nations in global measures of academic performance and lacks the trained workforce to meet the growing job market. Innovative philanthropic programs and business-supported initiatives around the world can serve as inspiration as the US seeks to engage the next generation in STEM education and entice them into careers in those growing sectors. The UK-based startup Kano (kano.me) is revolutionizing the way children interact with technology. Kano captures children’s interest and imaginations with build-it-yourself computer kits. After assembling their own working computers, kids dive into interactive gaming that helps them learn coding and computational thinking. Kano Blocks, is drag-and-drop system that allows users to use graphical blocks to build code, but also switch view to see the lines of code those blocks are creating. When playing classic games such as Pong or the uber-popular Minecraft, novice programmers can hack code to alter the parameters of the games – for instance size, speed and colors of game elements – in real time.”(more)